Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Duck 1.0: Has a beak, which can open and close, but only eats green bugs. If you attempt to use it on a blue bug it crashes. Unfortunately, no eyes.

Duck 1.2: Eyes.

Duck 1.21: Eyes now see color.

Duck 1.22: Eyes now see colors including black. Apparently, some bugs are black. Damn users and their damn uncolored colored bugs.

Duck 1.5: Realized eyes and mouth both share a lot of code. Refactored as "nerves". Allowed consumption of turquoise bugs -- not exactly sure why they're safe when blue bugs are not, oh well. Added quack just for fun. Spent 2 weeks getting the quack to sound exactly right.

Duck 2.0: Now with feet and wings! Turns out to have feet you really need muscle tissue. Refactored again, stealing code from Mouth. Supported modes of operation include walking, running, and swimming. Option in menu entry for flying but if you push it the duck dies.

Duck 2.1: It glides!

Duck 2.11: So it turns out that to utilize the gliding feature users were driving ducks off of tall cliffs. This resulted in downward acceleration being sufficient at end of glide to overly stress feet muscles, causing critical duck failure. Added in Bones. Damn users and their damn cliffs. As long as I had Bones I implemented them in the Mouth too, can finally eat blue bugs.

Duck 2.12: Some blue bugs are poisonous?! WTF kind of bugs do you have in Australia. Added in Tongue. Borrows heavily from existing Nerve classes. More refactoring.

...

And if you think that is at all unrealistic, you're talking to the guy who wrote a program to print bingo cards whose 1.0 version, among numerous other faults, could not accommodate any printer but the default one ;)

Nah, that's pretty much the tale of a lot of software that I've written.

The only thing missing from some development goes is a notable feature reversion based on manager deciding that it is now going against the strategic vision.

"Duck used to have webbing in his feet, but MGMT thought having another fluid-moving apparatus would diminish how much you value the wing. May be available as a paid add-on at a later date."

You're an okay guy, but please stop mentioning bingo software constantly in almost every post you make. It's getting quite annoying. We know you write a bingo software, but please stop marketing it all the time. It's like being at a party and there is a mattress salesman who always brings the conversation back to mattresses and how he got started, and how he found good deals and so on. At the party, one can walk away from that guy, here, unfortunately not. So, don't use this forum as a marketing tool for your bingo thing. Just talk normally, and if people want to know more about our product, they click your name.

My apologies, that wasn't my intention. For one it would be rude. For two it would be stupid -- it is highly probable that precisely none of you are in my market.

I am, typically, neither rude nor stupid.

I am also typically surrounded by people who care very little about startups, software, and the like. So when I'm around other people who care about software, startups, and the like, I tend to mention our point of commonality a bit. The one I bring up most often is my own because a) I'm intimately acquainted with it and b) unlike my day job, I can talk about it without getting fired if I say too much.

But I try to be a good citizen here. You may feel that I mention my software in almost every post. Memory plays funny tricks with us. I don't trust mine with anything important, so I checked with the indispensable external memory of searchyc.com, and it turns out that I've mentioned it about 18 times in the last 255 comments, which is about 7% or so. (Throw another 6 on the tally for other people referring to my software, if you care to.) Now I might be counting wrong, as I suck at it almost as bad as I do at remembering things, but I don't suck quite so badly that 7% is "almost every post".

(Sidenote: this is my 256th comment? There should be a geekiversary for that.)

Now I do try to keep my contributions to the community worth having me here. If you are to believe the last ~1800 ish times people pushed the "More comments like this one please!" button, I like to think I'm doing a halfway decent job. But I'll try to recalibrate due to your feedback.

Say, what would it take to get you behind the controls of your very own gliding duck?

Also factor in the times you say stuff like "in my business", or "in my area" without explicitely mentioning your software. Such statements seem to be you begging us to check your profile to see what your business is.

Maybe just 7% of your comments are about your business, but imagine you are talking to a mattress salesman, and every 10th sentences he says is about mattresses or about his business. Is that not a bit annoying?

I'm not saying what you are doing is wrong or that it does not fit the standards of the community. I'm just saying it annoys me personally. Nobody else maybe, just me. So I'm pointing it out to you, because it may also be annoying someone else, and if nobody mentions it, you won't be aware of this.

For example, you original comment on this thread was funny and insightful. The followup comment about bingo software was not, it just seemed like marketing.

Lighten up. He wasn't marketing. He was illustrating his point with his own experience.

I'd love to, but I love my donuts!

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